Category Ethnicity

Entries 11 Total Description

First-gen Chinese American prone to wanderlust. Meditations galore with that lens.

“What’s your native country?”

Oct 15, ’11 3:54 PM

“The United States.”

“Yes, yes, but what’s your native country?”

It doesn’t matter how nice you are. If you can’t ask the right question, you won’t get the answer you’re looking for.

I might pick up on what you mean, but this is on you, not me.

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Where are all the minorities?

May 27, ’11 12:45 PM

UPDATE: Two links to this blog entry, which has been a fascinating experience so far. The Black Bottom excerpted this post while MLive included it in their West Michigan links roundup. The MLive trolls this way come, and oh lordy.
 

Last night, there was a panel in which Detroit and Grand Rapids heavyweights mingled on stage to discover what each of the two cities could learn from each other. Among them was Carl Erickson, who owns a custom software firm just down the street. I respect Carl greatly, and in typical Carl style, he laid it out, no gloss: In his travels to Detroit, he appreciates the diversity of entrepreneurs. He comes back to GR, and it’s all white. Carl doesn’t think it’s an issue of where are minority entrepreneurs; he thinks they aren’t here.

It was jarring, not least because of the bluntness. The absence of diversity is fact, and it’s a big topic (too big?) to spring on stage. In tackling the topic, one GR panelist said this was her biggest grievance with the city. The conversation moved on, and I left.

It’s been simmering since last night and during my morning walk. Working for a 30+ year-old nonprofit, I’m not technically an entrepreneur, but I think of myself as a self-starter. So I considered myself an appropriate test case: What would it actually take to make me stay in GR?

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Regarding the Bartertown #muraldebate

Mar 31, ’11 4:38 PM

UPDATE: MLive’s Troy Reimink put together a recap of the #muraldebate and quoted this email. This email was sent independently of the mural debate and just happened to coincide with the day that the mural debate began.

I feel compelled to share my email to Ryan yesterday regarding the Bartertown mural. The #muraldebate on Twitter is lively, but I’m afraid that people think the issue starts and ends with Che—that Che is the litmus, and if Che has a valid spot on that wall, then the same goes for the other 75% of that mural. Ryan responded in a more personalized version of point number one in Bartertown’s official statement and offered to chat, something I fully intend to take him up on.


Hi, Ryan—

I admire your efforts to establish a vegan eatery that’s both accessible and cozy. I came down to Bartertown for the first time during Wake Up Weekend. To be blunt, I was stunned to see Mao leading the charge with a ladle, cultural revolutionaries dishing out saucers, hoisting signs and cradling an allusion to that iconic red book.

The only reason I could imagine that you reappropriated this historical event for your walls is because of the association with socialism. But honestly, as a Chinese American, I couldn’t understand why you would choose this scene any more than you would have pulled a chapter out of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. Although it’s still hotly debated—hundreds of thousands or millions—a horrifying number of political dissidents, ethnic minorities and wrongly accused innocents in China were persecuted, tortured, raped and killed during Mao’s reign. All of it in the name of the proletariat.

One of my operational underpinnings is “From each according to his[/her] abilities, to each according to his[/her] needs.” I can sympathize with the philosophy of socialism, but I don’t see the sound logic in choosing that historical scene to capture it.

I’m not claiming to speak for all Chinese and Chinese Americans. I also can’t assume that someone else has pointed out to you just how thunderstruck a person of that ethnic heritage might find the mural. I believe in the concepts behind what you’re doing and want to frequent Bartertown, but as a member of this community, I feel the responsibility to point out how uncomfortable this and other portrayals could make your potential patrons.

Best,
Denise Cheng.

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Carnival of Journalism – First-generation youth and context

Feb 16, ’11 10:15 PM

Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities

This is probably one that’s closest to my heart, and the most organic entry point for me.

In the full description of the recommendation, the Knight Foundation sets the scene for a “Geek Corps” that assigns post-college volunteers to public institutions to help them leverage digital media technologies. There already exists something like this, a program of which I proudly call myself an alum: the Digital Arts Service Corps (formerly the CTC VISTA Project).

But when I first read the recommendation, my mind gravitated toward youth rather than young adults. More specifically, first-generation youth in minority communities. Most of my experience in media has been imagining how to leverage everyday tools for media creation by sources that are not traditionally seen as information providers. This has ranged from mobile media creation by immigrant communities and Millennials to my current position as the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocal news site for Grand Rapids, Mich.

When we look at the purpose of information, it’s to acquaint communities with the intricacies of issues and phenomena that have a direct effect on them. There are patches of media that serve youth, that serve immigrants but there is a whole swath that straddles the line between cultures, and youth has proven to be a volatile time across the board.

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Common ground

Dec 14, ’10 11:14 PM

I don’t think I talk enough about how important language is to me.

When I was young, my mom would tell me that at night, I traveled in my dreams. You went to Korea, she’d say. And Venezuela, and Israel and made a quick stop in Australia. Next, off to Mongolia. I would wake up in a cocoon of sheets, hanging off the farthest tip of the bed.

When I was young, I made a list of languages I wanted to learn. I rearranged it every year. First, it was Korean, Hebrew, French, Japanese, Cantonese, Urdu and sign language. Then it was Pidgin, German, Korean, Hebrew, Spanish, French and Thai. I never counted less than seven languages at a time. I wanted to talk with the world.

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Chinese matryoshka dolls

May 22, ’09 12:22 PM

To my mom, my blog entries are complete gobbledygook. She understands not a word. Mom rarely makes her way to my little web patch, so I feel pretty safe about sharing my plans.

As a CTC Vista, I’m hardly raking in large sums right now, at least not enough to get my mom a sumptuous birthday present. Besides that, she regifts most of the presents I buy anyhow. With these facts in mind, I’ve decided to make her next birthday gift: customized nesting dolls, starting with my great grandmother.

blankmatryo

Mom was the second born in a six-kid line-up, but she was the eldest daughter. She was very close to her mother, who died at a relatively young golden age of lung cancer (she was in her early 60s; I was 14 at the time). What I remember of puo-puo was something of a social butterfly, generosity, and internalizing the pain from her eldest daughter’s failed marriage (divorce was still unusual in Chinese society), 15 hours apart and nearly 7,000 miles away.

Mom in her late 20s. Her favorite descriptors for herself—loosely translated—are "carried herself well" and "Jennifer-full-of-grace."

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Brain surgery ≠ American citizenship

Apr 17, ’09 1:20 PM

I woke up this morning to OPB‘s Think Out Loud. Host Emily Harris was broaching the DREAM Act, in which undocumented immigrants under 35 who have been schooled primarily in the States could pay in-state college tuition and eventually be granted citizenship amnesty. The percentage of these undocumented immigrants going on to four-year universities currently is minuscule and the majority of them have no memory of their parents’ countries; they were raised in the United States.

The guests on the show ranged from an undocumented immigrant smuggled into the US at seven weeks to the president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform. Although this post is not meant to spawn a debate on the legitimacy of the DREAM Act, it is a response to some of the infuriating and illogical comments made by Jim Ludwick, president of OIR. The part that really got me rankled came at about 35:50 in the episode:

New Yorker Cartoon by J.B. Handelsman
New Yorker cartoon by J.B. Handelsman

“I keep hearing this term ‘undocumented’ thrown around, but that’s an intellectually dishonest term … In addition, it creates this attitude of, man if I just had this document, everything would be all right. Well, a document is more than a piece of paper. It’s a signal that somebody’s done something, accomplished something. It would be like me saying, I’m a brain surgeon—put a sign up on the wall that says ‘Jim Ludwick, Brain Surgeon’—I am not a brain surgeon. A piece of paper is meaningless unless it shows something.”

What kind of equivocation is that? Becoming a brain surgeon is a result of effort. Being born a citizen of the United States is a result of circumstance.

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Web 3.0

Mar 14, ’09 11:06 AM

UPDATE: Racialicious included this post in a great roundup of worthwhile reads concerning media and race.

 
I’m slightly frustrated right now. I just came from a session entitled Emerging Trends of Mobile Technology, where the launching pad started with smartphones. Throughout the session, the emphasis was on how we use old technology in combination with new ones to form an innovative tool. For example, image recognition to create augmented realities and find cut-throat product prices, &c.

Most people in the room seemed to be developers or designers of some sort, and many of the questions were based on cutting edge technology, the next wave, “web 3.0.” But while everyone was drooling over their next money-generating app, a question was left out: What are the moral implications of this technology?

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Some cibo

Feb 20, ’09 9:07 AM

I’ve been chewing on some random thoughts lately and thought I’d put it out there and see what other people think.

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My Portland romance

Feb 16, ’09 1:36 PM

It took a big hit the other day, my romance with Portland. I’ve been here about a year now, and for the first time ever, I really understood how Portland’s progressiveness might be a tall tale.

It was Valentine’s Day, and Charlie and I took a bus ride to SE 82nd and Division. We were going to have dim sum at Wong’s King Seafood Restaurant, something I’ve been trying to organize for the last two weeks–since Chinese New Years started–but have been incredibly unsuccessful with. I was itching to see this part of Portland. When my mom visited in November, she had asked around to figure out where the real Chinatown was, and the resounding answer was this far-off intersection. There were less bikers and pedestrians as the street numbers climbed while increasingly more restaurants and schools flew multilingual banners: Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese and English.

The bus warp-sped through a wormhole between 57th and 85th streets. In that 30-block span, the greenery, the foot traffic–all of it disappeared. The quaint, early 20th century houses faded into 70′s architecture and sprawl. We were dropped off in a literal concrete jungle with debris instead of sidewalks and crosswalks every three blocks.

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